jetblast, I know you feel frustrated by this. This is typical of the Eureka Effect I spoke about above. You know The Truth. The rest is therefore just details and pettifogging.
You feel like you have seen the sculpture hidden inside the rock, and it is just a matter of Michaelangelo chipping away at the dross to leave the image revealed in all its glory.
The problem - the metapor of the hidden sculpture is not real. It is a poetic idea. There is just undifferentiated rock all the way through, and the mind of the sculptor imposing his will on it. Any other sculptor could have taken the same rock and made something entirely different.
Part of your frustration is your sense that you are smarter than us. (You keep referring to “smart” people understanding things - this is clearly just coded language for “jetblast is smart”.
Whether you are smarter than us or not is not something I will take the time to discuss, to avoid a “my IQ can kick your IQ’s ass any day of the week” exchange. But I will say that being smart does not give anyone privileged access to truth. There have been Nobel prizewinners who were cranks outside their fields (or even in them - Linus Pauling had wildly inflated ideas about the value of Vitamin C as a universal panacea, and he won two Nobel Prizes). Einstein got stuff wrong, too - God apparently does play dice.
There are two Western cultural biases that feed your beliefs. First is the power of the image of Cassandra - the person cursed with the ability to see the truth yet not be believed. To identify yourself with her must be a very emotionally powerful experience for you. Yet you must realise that the reason the overwhelming majority of people who think of themselves as Cassandras are not believed is simply because they are wrong.
The second cultural bias is a related one, specific to scientific inquiry - the attractiveness of the notion of the stellar genius working in isolation figuring out the earth-shattering breakthrough that has stumped the finest of minds. To be the first to see what no-one else has been smart enough to see. Part of the juiciness of the idea is tolerating the slings and arrows flung at the idea, only to be proved right in the end. But as someone upthread has hinted at, and as the writer John Sladek has said, “They laughed at Copernicus. They laughed at Galileo. And they laughed at Punch and Judy.”
The vast majority of people whose ideas are laughed at are not Galileo. Nor are you. You have no real-world experience of just how weak the evidence you are trying to rely upon is, or would become upon close scrutiny. You have a false sense of what’s normal in police investigations. You have a false sense (derived from extravagant fiction) of what intelligence operations are like, and that intelligence operatives have superhuman competence.
You handwave the identification of major gaps in your theory with protestations that it is all detail - the beauty of the big picture idea triumphs over all.
Well, no. In the real world, people who have to be responsible about decision making have to be shown more than just faces in the clouds.